LA MIRADA, Calif. — Biola Men's Water Polo begins its very busy week with a big win! The Eagles were in control from start-to-finish inside of their home pool as they worked their way to a 12-4 drubbing of visiting Mount St. Mary's.
The win is Biola's fourth in its last six matches and second of the year over The Mount. This helped the Eagles improve to 3-1 at home this year and now 3-2 all-time against Mount St. Mary's. This contest had a bit of a different flavor than the one a few weeks back where the Eagles just scraped by with a 15-14 win over the Mountaineers.
Coach Nordell credits the change in performance to the benefit of having his team back healthy. The last few weeks the team has been dealing with illness, and now they're working back to full strength. The results show it, too.
Biola pulled out ahead 2-0 and then used a stretch of five consecutive scores after The Mount scored their first to build a commanding 7-1 lead early in the second period. This lead proved beneficial as Biola went the entire third period without a single goal scored, but still managed to enter the final 8 minutes with a comfortable 7-4 lead.
Then, the Eagles turned up the offensive pressure a ton, using goals from Gavin McKenzie, Kyle Seifin, Ryle Hibbard and Christian Trapp to outscore Mount St. Mary's 5-0 in a dominant fourth quarter.
Hibbard ended up as the game's leading scorer, tucking away three goals for his first hat trick of the season. Nolan Rapp was once again the leading point man with four tallies (1 goal, 3 assists).
The Eagles were able to rotate in a ton of players to help keep legs fresh as this was just game one of a seven-match weekend for BU. As such, the time in the cage was split between Mitchell Carpenter and Joshua Dachenhausen. Carpenter had eight blocks and just three goals allowed in the first half. Dachenhausen matched that and then some with nine saves and just one goal allowed in the second.
Seifen and McKenzie had two goals a piece in strong efforts despite the capped playing time.
Biola improved to 6-10 overall with the early morning victory. They play twice more on Thursday over at Whittier College. The Eagles face Wagner College (7-7) at 2:30 p.m. and then have the chance to play the hosting Whittier Poets (7-1) at 5 p.m.
Catch live results from those contests directly on TheFOSH.
Gallery: (10-3-2024) MWP vs Mount St. Mary's
